fevnut's musings 2023/#10 Batley, Milestones and The Penalty Count Illusion

  

 

 

Batley

It felt great to beat Batley last weekend and to continue our 100% Championship start to the season into 8 games. Of course, we ought to be beating Batley but after last season there were understandable nerves amongst Fev fans going into the Fev match.

We arrived at Mount Pleasant more than an hour before kick-off to find the lovely area behind the main stand packed full and with hardly any Batley supporters in sight. That area creates a great atmosphere when it is like that.

The first half performance was excellent. The second half, far less so. Most people would put that down to the famous Batley slope. Maybe they should have called the club Batley Mountaineers rather than Bulldogs! There is no doubt whatsoever that the slope really helps a kicking game. We can recall several times when there had been a strong wind down the pitch that made attempts to kick up the hill almost impossible with the ball often going only a very short distance.

Last year we set off with a tremendous 54-20 win there in the Challenge Cup with a man of the match performance from Craig Hall who scored two tries and kicked nine goals out of ten attempts. That made being held to a draw, again at Mount Pleasant the following week in the league, especially hard to take.

Even worse, and you can’t blame the pitch for this, we later lost to them with awful performances in both the league and, worst of all, in the play-offs. It does make one wonder what on earth happened. We can only surmise that Craig Lingard learned a lot when we smashed them in the Challenge Cup and came up with an excellent game plan to counteract Fev’s attacking play and also found some defensive weaknesses. Sadly, McDermott seemed to have no answer even though we should have learned from the drawn game.

Let’s hope that Sean Long doesn’t fall into the same trap. We are pretty confident that he won’t. It will be interesting to see how we go when Batley come to Fev in late July.

 

 

Milestones 

Yet again we had another Craig Hall milestone to record last week when he took to the pitch for his 350^th career appearance. Luke Briscoe’s try took him past 450 career points.

 

If he plays on Sunday, it will be Captain Lockwood’s 300^th career appearance (so far 49 for Dewsbury and 240 for Rovers). What an incredible career he has had and he deserves huge thanks from Fev supporters for the wonderful service he has given us. While playing nearly all his career as a prop he has, nevertheless, twice scored hat tricks for Fev – against Keighley in 2013 and against Rochdale in 2018. 

The Penalty Count Illusion

 

Time again we come across instances in which fans truly believe that the referee is being particularly harsh on their team. There was yet another example last week with Fev fans suggesting that the penalty count was about four to one in favour of Batley.

It wasn’t although it was very much in Batley’s favour with them being awarded 10 penalties as against 5 for Fev.

Why do fans so often get it wrong? We believe it is down to perception. Fans notice the penalties given against their team much more than the penalties awarded to them. Perception is a funny thing. The brain so often interprets things in a way that belies the facts.

That’s how and why visual illusions work. The eye is not a camera and interprets what we see and the interpretation distorts by both expectations and emotions.

There is an illusion known as Necker’s cube. It appears ambiguous because there are two different squares which could be the nearest face of the cube. If one concentrates on the idea that one of them is nearer and then concentrate on the idea that the other is nearer, and then start to blink it is possible to see it alternately with each blink and the ‘cube’ appears to move on the page! Why? It isn’t a cube, it is twelve lines on a flat piece of paper but the brain interprets those lines as a solid object.

 

 

There can be no doubt that fans perception of the way in which referees treat their team is often also ‘illusory’. I wonder how many times we have been at matches where both sets of fans have been convinced that the referee is biased against their team!! That’s where the emotional interpretation of what is in front of them comes into play.